For those of you who've never heard of the game, For the Frog the Bell Tolls is a Gameboy title from 1992 that never left Japan. It was created by members of the teams that brought us Super Metroid, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, and Metroid II: The Return of Samus. Fans have been working to translate the game into English for a while, and tonight, their work is done (patch found here.)
I want this game for the music alone, but the copious amount of weird comedy, a narrative focus on "...princes who turn into frogs and snakes, bizarre characters with twisted senses of humor, some underage beatings of fairy tale characters, and a deranged inventor working for a parody of Nintendo" has me feeling pretty good.
Also, the main character appears to be beige, just like me! Way to represent my beige brothers, Nintendo. Now just show some support to the fans who worked hard on that translation patch, and bring their localized version of the game (or better yet, the canceled DX version) to the 3DS eShop.
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"Now just show some support to the fans who worked hard on that translation patch, and bring their localized version of the game (or better yet, the canceled DX version) to the 3DS eShop."
Why would you even bother to write this? I would bet my life that it'll never happen.
Mother 3 comes to mind, but thankfully they did a great fan translation patch as well so we could get to play it :) AMAZING GAME!!!
@Manthal
My thoughts exactly, even if they brought it to the e-shop Ninty would probably have their own translators handle it.
I'm gonna show my support by downloading the patch, rom, and emulator and playing it :) like they intended us to do! Don't know why Johnny just didn't say that instead, but maybe they have a thing on this site against that kinda stuff, I noticed the words emulator and rom weren't mentioned once in the article yet its about a rom patch........
@ Manthai- Fun. Everything I write here at Dtoid comes from my love of videogames, and the fun that comes from expressing that love.
The level of efficacy that my opinions have in influencing the decisions of others means nothing to me. As long as I can go to bed a night knowing that I did my best to speak my mind, I can rest easy.
How come translating is such a pain for these fan translations? Aren't there a lot of people that are bi-lingual - fluent in both Japanese and English?
I'd have to guess this game is great by the cred of the developers, I might have to check this one out.
@indigit: It's not so much the translation that's the pain, it's putting it into the game and making it work. I remember reading in great detail on the M3 translation that getting the Japanese text replaced with English was a monumental undertaking...and then editing the language engine or whatever broke other things in the game itself. It's not as easy as "this file points to another file that has text in it, so we just swap where it points" in most cases.
In the case of M3, translation went from just text, to altering the text in-game, to making it use the font in Earthbound, to making it look good and otherwise work at all.
In case any of you didn't know, Prince Richard is in Link's Awakening before the 3rd dungeon/level. You have to gather 5 golden leaves for him from his castle in order to get the slime key. There are a bunch of frogs in his hut.
I've been wanting this ever since I first looked up where Richard came from in Link's Awakening. That game is tied with OoT as my favorite Zelda, so if the team drew heavy inspiration from this it should prove to be absolutely amazing.
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Contest:
10:30 PM on 07.12.2011 | 
Kinda wish they had brought it over now.
Why would you even bother to write this? I would bet my life that it'll never happen.
Mother 3 comes to mind, but thankfully they did a great fan translation patch as well so we could get to play it :) AMAZING GAME!!!
@Manthal
My thoughts exactly, even if they brought it to the e-shop Ninty would probably have their own translators handle it.
I'm gonna show my support by downloading the patch, rom, and emulator and playing it :) like they intended us to do! Don't know why Johnny just didn't say that instead, but maybe they have a thing on this site against that kinda stuff, I noticed the words emulator and rom weren't mentioned once in the article yet its about a rom patch........
The level of efficacy that my opinions have in influencing the decisions of others means nothing to me. As long as I can go to bed a night knowing that I did my best to speak my mind, I can rest easy.
I'd have to guess this game is great by the cred of the developers, I might have to check this one out.
In the case of M3, translation went from just text, to altering the text in-game, to making it use the font in Earthbound, to making it look good and otherwise work at all.
I don't know if I know anyone who loves videogames quite like you do. That is a compliment on so many levels.
As a side note, this is the type of thing Nintendo themselves should be doing and releasing for download.